This is doubtless where we are headed, if corporate profits remains the ultimate arbiter of society's allocation of resources. There is no countervailing force to this tendency. What's supposed to stop it? In the above quote, Eisenhower suggested that "only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry" could serve as a countervailing force. As admirably prescient as much of his speech has proved to be, 47 years later we can all see that this potential countervailing force has been neutered, smashed, and removed from the playing field.
Much of the MIC's growth is driven by economic forces that would exist whether the US was "at war" or not. From the late 1940's until 2001, the MIC grew steadily, slurping insatiably from the public trough -- and there were only a few outright wars of significant duration -- Vietnam and Korea. There were numerous smaller or shorter-lived interventions, in addition. But most of the time, it was possible to keep the MIC growing steadily, even without fighting on a scale that objectively warranted MIC expansion. Even when the USSR -- the ostensible "threat" that was supposedly the MIC's raison d'etre -- disintegrated, there was no letup in "defense" spending. Instead, there was panic in Washington to come up with a new "enemy" that could replace the "Communist Menace" as a justification for MIC growth. The primary imperative was MIC growth; finding an "enemy" to justify it was secondary.
MIC expansion was immensely profitable even without occupying countries whose natural resources were great economic prizes. But the fateful US turn towards open military aggression, including the establishment of enduring bases in Iraq, created the conditions for profit-making opportunities which hadn't existed before. It opened up whole new vistas of corporate militarism.
Other roles in the MIC are played by politically-connected companies like Blackwater and Halliburton. Still another role is played by the oil companies (whose executives met with Cheney 4 months before 9/11 to gaze at maps of Iraqi oil fields together -- without the MSM finding this in any way improper!).
The basic project in Iraq -- projecting military force into an oil-rich country -- flows directly from the logic of capitalism. In terms of causation (as has been articulated for years with great clarity by the WSWS {6}), the project reflects the decline of the US global economic position. The US is attempting to use its military prowess -- its one remaining area of unquestioned superiority -- to compensate for its deteriorating economic dominance.
In terms of forward-looking strategic goals, the project is inspired by the oil and gas; and the leverage it would give the US, to be able to control the energy spigot of its rivals. Under the rules of capitalism, there is simply no way to pass up an "opportunity" like this, any more than any corporate board can ever afford to pass up a chance for a truly lucrative acquistion. Initially, one might hesitate at small impediments like the US Constitution and international law. But such trifles are easily swept aside. The "law" must give way, because the law arises from the foundation of the profit system, not the other way around. (Another affirmation of Marx: the economic system is primary; while concepts of law are subordinate, and are abandoned when they no longer serve the system. Similarly, concepts of politics are subordinate, and are abandoned when no longer useful. This is why the Bill of Rights, Geneva Conventions, habeas corpus, & so on are simply being thrown overboard.)
Stepping back for a moment to assess how all the forces line up, one sees that the imperatives of the economic system "incentivize" war at every level. The only force against the war is the population who's being forced to fight it and pay for it -- but they have no power. By contrast, the oil and oil-service companies, the security companies, weapons makers, helicopter makers, military-base service & construction firms, and so forth, all have a great deal to gain by more war. And they all have plenty of power.
The arena of official politics reflects the decidedly pro-war imperatives of the economic system. There, we currently see the spectacle of the "presidential primaries," where both parties are predictably moving towards nominating pro-war candidates (neatly disenfranchising the 70% of the public that opposes the war). One party is unabashedly pro-war; the other is no less determined to achieve the strategic and economic goals of the occupation, but conceals this by emphasizing language like "getting the troops home as soon as possible." Meanwhile, the media also reflects the same system imperatives, portraying the establishment of permanent military bases in an oil-rich country as "fighting terrorism, to keep Americans safe." No candidates of either party dare contradict this laughably dishonest and self-serving formulation -- to do so would run counter to sacred points of state doctrine.
Even the perennial media and government cheerleaders for the "strength of the US economy" had recently begun to acknowledge that there will be some rough sailing ahead. For years, these voices had blithely ignored the failings illustrated by burgeoning trade and budget deficits, mounting indebtedness, weak job creation, the offshoring of American jobs, the stock market and housing bubbles, and the drop in real living standards for over 80% of the population since 1977.{7}
Though the MSM has predictably sought to conceal it, the trigger for the currently threatened collapse -- the credit crunch brought about by the subprime mortgage fiasco -- is a tremendous crime. It's not (as the MSM narrative would have it) a "natural" economic problem, like the fluctuations of the business cycle. Rather, it stems from a massive Enron-style looting, far more ambitious than anything Ken Lay ever pulled off. Mortgage originators knew perfectly well that they were creating "securities" based on something that was guaranteed to fail: the ability of uncreditworthy homebuyers to buy wildly overpriced houses. They created these securities, got rating firms like Moody's to rate them "AAA," then turned right around and sold sliced-and-repackaged versions of these things to other banks and pension funds around the world. Now much of the financial world is sinking in the resultant toxic sludge.
Nonetheless, the shysters who did this (aided & abetted by financial deregulation, which both parties backed), and some of the banks they sold sludge to, are still very powerful people. They got their friends at the Fed to bail them out. This makes the banks happy, and it makes the stock market happy. But it does nothing to help those who were victimized by predatory loans and will lose their homes to foreclosure; or the many retirees who live on interest income from their savings. It harms the entire domestic population, who will be paying the bill via increased inflation, as the dollar drops and import prices rise. The Fed's action is "of Wall St, by Wall St, and for Wall St." Essentially, it shifts the burden of paying for the theft from the powerful to the powerless. This is only to be expected, in a society that's run almost exclusively to protect the interests of the privileged.
It's very significant that the looters themselves -- the loan originators -- are not only going to get away scot-free with their crime, but are not even going to be conceptually identified. The entire matter is being shoved under the rug, as the MSM builds a divorced-from-reality narrative of the gallant Fed "rescuing the economy," while it's really just trying to bail out the banks, including some that colluded in the original crime, and others who simply made foolish investments (which you're supposed to "own," in capitalist theory). The economic "problem" is being presented to the public as a "credit crunch." Nobody really understands just what that means -- which is all to the good, as far as the criminals and their powerful protectors are concerned -- but the term is useful because a "credit crunch," like a hurricane, has no deliberately scheming villains behind it. The mortgage scam, by contrast, certainly does have scheming villains behind it.
Note that the MSM narrative bears a striking parallel to the official narrative on Iraq, where what is really a world-class crime committed by the most powerful US institutions, driven by the private profit of a small class of people, is portrayed as a "noble undertaking" which supposedly "protects all Americans." In both delusional narratives, the crime in question is asserted to be "good" because it "helps all Americans" -- in the one case by rescuing "their" economy, in the other by protecting their "security." Only in a society where class consciousness has been so systematically erased from the public culture, could a national media hope to get away with conflating the interests of "all Americans" with those of a handful of giant politically-connected corporations.
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